A Different Kind of COVID
This week, my daughter finally got her license, a month and a week after the intended date circled on my calendar. I took her birthday off months in advance, but when April 6 rolled around, all the government offices were closed. School was closed, the sleepover was weeks beyond cancelled. Life felt cancelled. We spent the day instead celebrating her existence any way I could think to do.
As Missouri and the world cautiously peeps out from behind closed drapes, I'm vacillating wildly inside. Part of me looks at those around me cavalierly chatting an arms' length away without a mask or apparently a care in the world and wonders if I am punishing myself and my family unreasonably. The other part keeps clicking on horrifying tales from Queens hospitals as if to remind myself why I'm home. We found this fawn in our yard this morning. Animal Control thinks he may have been born last night. I check on him every few hours to see if his mama has come back yet. His pose is my mental state during the pandemic.
At the beginning of all this, I bought new novel-writing software and dug out the novel-in-progress I started multiple years ago. I, like many, thought I'd be so productive without commuting or being able to socialize outside my yard. I misestimated how much mental effort it would take to keep myself grounded from day to day. The level of effort to keep my anxiety from spiralling out of control has ebbed and fallen. I never know if tonight I will wake up at four am unable to find my way back to sleep, or if I'll hit my alarm five times with the feeling of dead exhaustion I haven't experienced since my vitamin D levels dropped dangerously in 2016. Or if I'll pop out of bed hungry and ready to smell the flowers. I have so many thoughts every day of ideas for short stories and novels and blog posts and advice columns that I know I should write before I forget them. ("I used to be funny," I said not that long ago to a new co-worker.)
Today I dragged my laptop outside to see how much our money we gave to Instacart this week and saw a post from my friend Deborah Siegel in my inbox. It had been there for a while. Getting myself to read my personal email is as hard as getting me to log into social media. The post talked about writers not writing during the pandemic. I wanted to cry. The way I have dealt with every scary thing in my life has always been to write about it. So I'm making myself put at least a few paragraphs down so I won't forget what this felt like. I write to remember, so I can remember later what it felt like to live my life.
It's shocking how easy it is to forget your own story.